FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

Welcome to yet another week of JavaFX links. I hope you’re all doing well, and that you find something of interest in this weeks roundup.

The JavaOne call for papers has opened up, and closes mid-April. It is time to get your sessions submitted! Hopefully I’ll get to go along again and will see you all there again (and continue the tradition of the Java Desktop lunch).

It’s not until late April, but you’re not going to want to miss the introduction to the JavaFX Scene Builder tool, being given by Nicolas Lorain (PM for JavaFX) and Jasper Potts (Developer Experience Architect for JavaFX). This is at the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group, but as always you can attend virtually and join in the live webcast.

Michael Heinrichs, a developer in the JavaFX team at Oracle, has explored the JavaFX CSS functionality, something he admits he was not involved in developing, and comes away pleasantly surprised by how well it works. Considering this is something my team ‘owns’, I’m very pleased he is happy (but all praise should be directed at David Grieve, the long-standing owner of all CSS functionality in JavaFX).

One of the missing features of JavaFX in the 2.0 release was a ComboBox control, and I’m very pleased to say that we’ll be filling this gap in JavaFX 2.1. Indeed, it is already in the developer preview builds we’re putting out, and has been sitting in the OpenJFXmercurial repo for some weeks now. I’m fortunate enough to even be getting bug reports filed in our Jira issue tracker, which is justification enough to be getting early developer preview releases out into your hands as early as we have!

Christian Schudt has blogged about his improvements to the JavaFX TreeView control to allow for populating it using just a List of items, rather than having to create TreeItem instances. This is something I’ll likely add to the DataFX project in the coming weeks as it seems like a useful thing to have.

Brian Schlining has created a ScalaFX version of the GroovyFX demo application.

I found this cool project for web developers this week called Animate.css. It has 52 ready to go animations that you can apply to any dom node. I thought having this for JavaFX would be really handy. We are planning on adding CSS animations to JavaFX in the future along with Web standard CSS properties. Once we do that you will be able to use Animate.css directly in JavaFX but I thought it was too cool to make you wait. So I have written JavaFX Transition classes for each of these 52 animations and put the code for them in the FXExperienceControls project. So now all you need to do in your code is:

Button btn = new Button("Button");
new TadaTransition(btn).play();

That will play the animation and clean up after its self. I put together a demo application that shows off all the animations. You can download and run the project Blog-Demos/CannedAnimations from our github repo.

Here is what it looks like, enjoy playing with it. I can’t wait to start using these in the applications I build 🙂

The JavaFX 1.x series of releases have been given their marching orders – these releases will stop being available on December 20, 2012. This is not to be confused with the current JavaFX 2.x series of releases, which are plowing on full steam ahead!

Tom Schindl has been having fun with SVG and JavaFX 2.0. He takes an SVG file, converts it to FXML, and then proceeds to look up elements of the scenegraph and animate them. This shows how easy it is for designers and developers to interact.

Johan Vos has announced that RedFX has been ported to JavaFX 2.x. RedFX provides functionality that allows JavaFX applications to share data with each other and with server applications without the need of writing lots of specific boiler plate code.